dj booth
DJ AMEN
KING OF THE SUPER HYPHY
T
he future for a DJ is being a businessman. An all-around hustler, marketing, branding; you gotta take care of all corners.
One thing always leads to another. When it came to the concerts, me and my partner were supposed to help this one dude book a show but he died a week before the show. I didn’t know dude; he was just the dude that came to us for help. That was our first concert so we didn’t really know what we were doing but we fell into it, and it was so successful that we kept doing them. I’ve always been big into marketing and branding so I was like, “Let’s push this brand and make this a machine.” By the time we [did] our 20th concert like people didn’t even care who was performing. They just wanted to hear that name and that brand [Super Hyphy]. With the Super Hyphy, basically, it fell onto us [and now] we’re the best at it. I had my street team in the streets. My boy handled all the business, I handled all the marketing and we went hard. We wanted to come with something fresh to really take over the culture at the moment. It was instant success. We sold out twenty shows. We just had the right formula. Our biggest show as far as attendance was Super Hyphy 13 at the Santa Rosa fairgrounds. We had Keak the Sneak, Mistah F.A.B., The Pack, PSD and J. Diggs [performing]. There were over two thousand kids there, and we were doing this every 4 weeks, so it wasn’t like we were only pulling in a thousand every once in a while. We have one to two thousand kids every month.
24 // OZONE WEST
[For the last Super Hyphy] we tried to end big. We filmed it and it was real big. E-40 came out and did his thing and killed it. People in other markets and other towns wanted us to expand, and they wanted to get a piece of the Super Hyphy. We still do shows in other places. We’ve got a show coming up with Too $hort and The Pack but it’s not called Super Hyphy. It’s just the same concept because we’re the people that started that. We just did a show with Lil Wayne in Tucson, Arizona with nine thousand people. We do shows in San Diego; we do shows in Los Angeles, Las Vegas…all over the place. A lot of people don’t know that we have an event coordination/production company [called Noisemaker Entertainment] so we throw events all over the West Coast. It’s all about supply and demand. We find people interested in doing events and help them produce it. We get ahold of the artists, [book] travel accommodations, lock down venues, insurance, security, everything. We’re doing some tour dates for the Tech N9ne and Paul Wall shows coming up. The Lil Wayne show is the biggest we’ve done in the last month or two. But we could do anybody. As long as you’ve got the budget we can put it together. // As told to Kay Newell Photo by D-Ray